The origins of the English novel were essentially bourgeois, and throughout the 18th and the 19th centuries the novel was deeply connected to society, with the gain or loss of social status as its recurring theme. The novelist was a mediator between the characters and the reader, relating significant events and incidents in chronological order in a more or less objective way. The linear structure of the novel remained unaltered until the second decade of the 20th century.
The shift from the Victorian to the modern novel was caused by a gradual but substantial transformation of British society. The novelist had a new role, which consisted in mediating between the solid and unquestioned values of the past and the confused present, highlighting the complexity of the unconscious. This new 'realism, influenced by French and Russian writers, tended to shift from society to the individual, regarded as a limited creature whose moral progress was inferior to the advances in technology. Two other factors contributed to the development of the modern novel: the new concept of time and the new theory of the unconscious which derived from the Freudian influence.
The modern novelist rejected omniscient narration because it could no loner adequately represent the reality. He experimented with new methods to portray the individual consciousness; the viewpoint shifted from the external world to the internal world of a character's mind. The analysis of a character's consciousness was influenced by the theories about the simultaneous existence of different levels of consciousness and subconsciousness.
Time was subjective and internal: if the distinction between past and present was almost meaningless in psychological terms, then there was no point in building a well-structured plot, with chronological sequence of events.
The narrative technique that modern novelists mainly employed was the so-called stream of consciousness. William James coined the phrase 'stream of consciousness' to define the continuous flow of thoughts and sensation that characterise the human mind.